


For the Damaged

by Bartonfink



Category: Far Cry (Video Games), Far Cry 5
Genre: Epilogue, Gen, Post ‘Good’ Ending, Stockholm Syndrome, ambiguous deputy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-18
Updated: 2018-04-18
Packaged: 2019-04-24 14:05:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14357028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bartonfink/pseuds/Bartonfink
Summary: Sitting out a Nuclear Holocaust takes its toll on everyone.





	For the Damaged

**Author's Note:**

> This game broke me. Waited two damn weeks for my invite to post this. Probably won’t be the last??? Sorry for the uneditedness this is hot from my mobile to your screens!!! I’ve been blown away by the amazing fics already here so hopefully this...just doesn’t suck.

At first, it’s Skeeter Davis.

_Don’t they know, it’s the end of the world…_

It feels like you’re listening underwater - your lungs are heavy too. Everything’s heavy.

He’s so fucking pleased with himself, cackling from the other room because he knows you can hear it, even though everything’s still fuzzy around the edges. 

The dark is so warm, so inviting, until the smell of sulfur creeps in, starts to burn the back of your throat and you think you’ve gone blind from a flash bright white light. A crackle of gunfire, barking, screaming. Always so much screaming. You’re screaming too when you wake up, fighting an invisible enemy as consciousness comes slowly. Scratching, flailing in the artificial light.

“Shh. Shh.”

How long has he been standing over you? How long has he been waiting for you?

...How fucking long has Skeeter Davis been playing?

Because you can’t look at him, you look down at your body. Clean, fresh bandages. So many of your war wounds healed over. The distinctive smell of antiseptic mixed with mild soap. 

“I’m so glad you’re here,” he says, and his voice is soft and small. Shepherd to lamb.

You fix your gaze upon him, staring blankly for a moment, before the darkness pulls you back gently into her comforting arms.

 

\---

 

“I’ve always thought of myself as a people person,” he tells you, as he’s feeding you noodles carefully, occasionally pausing to wipe your chin with a napkin. “I like projects. I like helping. Eden’s Gate was only ever meant to help people who couldn’t help themselves.” 

Couldn’t, wouldn’t.

“I just wanted them to see the light,” he sighs. “I just wanted them to see what I could see. I wanted to save them.”

It’s so long since you used your voice, you barely recognise it when you deign to reply.

“Me too.” 

All the Seed boys have (had?) such blue, blue eyes. You could drown in those eyes. You want to drown. You want your lungs to fill with water until you’re crushed from the inside out.

“I know,” he nods. He smiles. “I understand now. I was blind, but now I see.”

You groan, and swat the bowl of noodles away.

 

\---

 

Everything’s for you. Maybe everything was always for you. Drifting in and out of consciousness, you’re not sure it makes any difference. The tinkle of the piano, the soft melody of the song he won’t stop playing. 

“Did Dutch have any music that wasn’t chosen for its irony value?” you finally ask, on the day you’re strong enough to wobble into the other room without Joseph’s hand on the small of your back, keeping you upright. You wave him away, but he follows all the same, watching you curiously from the doorway. 

Thumbing through the crate of records makes you think of Wheaty. Which makes you think of Tammy. Which makes you think of Eli.

Dead dead dead.

Everything around you is death and doom and agony.

Your hands shake as you put on some Billie Holiday. When you limp back to the John Grisham novel you’d abandoned on the bed, you push past Joseph with a huff. He chuckles, but says nothing.

 

\---

 

You take turns with the music after that. 

He likes Nat King Cole and (hilariously) Dusty Springfield, but he’s affronted Dutch doesn’t have any classical or religious numbers stashed away.

You like ABBA and KISS (because he does not.)

The Platters, thankfully, haven’t made it as far as the bunker.

But whatever the music, it makes you feel less alone. When you close your eyes you pretend you’re far, far away. Johnny Cash in some seedy Missoula bar, The Beatles in your parents’ attic. Anywhere but here. Like you never came to Hope County. Never survived The End at all. Died a poor ignorant happy fool.

God, what you wouldn’t give to have fucking died like a fucking fool. 

Night and day are abstract concepts when you live in a tin can buried in the ground, but Joseph prominently displays a small alarm clock, and you’re encouraged to live your life by that. Lights out at eleven. Lights on at eight. 

In the dark you listen to the rhythmic sound of his heavy breathing from the other bunk. You could kill him. You could make good on the promise you made to everyone twenty times over. 

Problem is, promises don’t mean shit. 

 When sleep won’t come you hobble into the other room and pull Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here from the crate. (Who did this belong to? Robbie, maybe? What does it matter anymore.) 

Side Two, Track Two. 

You lie on the floor and stare up at the metal ceiling, arms splayed out so your fingertips feel the vibrations.

One night he finds you there, but he doesn’t say a word. He lies down by your side and pulls your hand into his. You don’t fight it. You stay like that until the alarm goes off in the fake morning.

 

\---

 

He still talks about God. He reads aloud from his bible and you listen, even if you can’t believe.

You always wanted to, back when you were a kid. Longed for the blind faith your parents had in some higher power. Never came. Maybe John was right all along about you. Jacob too. But with a captive audience of one the sermons are shorter, given in the mornings and evenings, before breakfast and after dinner.

He still calls you ‘child’ in his soft, lilting voice. After a while, you start to wonder if you ever had a name in the first place.

 

\---

 

You’ve never been much for small talk. Used to be a joke around the sheriff’s office. Joseph has enough chatter for both of you - likes to talk his faith, his vision. When you laugh hollowly and tell him none of it fucking matters anymore because you’re not getting out alive, he doesn’t seem to mind. Eventually you just learn to listen. Eventually you start asking him to tell you stories just to stave off the boredom, and he always obliges.

 You tell him some of your own, too. Not many, but some - about your friends from Holland County. About your ma and pa back home. All those useless Cheeseburger facts Wayne rattled off. The thought of that big lumbering diabetic bear’s corpse charred and gently smoking in the nuclear holocaust makes you laugh so hard you start to cry, and shake, and sob so violently Joseph gets down on his knees to hold you close.

And you let him.

You let him dress your wounds when he prises a razor blade from your clenched fist, slumped bloody across the bathroom floor.

You let him feed you those shitty freeze-dried noodles and hold a cup of water up to your mouth. 

You let him sleep curled around you, one possessive hand flat against the curve of your stomach. 

Self-preservation is a hungry kiss to his chapped lips, scarred fingers needy as they run over his brutalised flesh, wanting to be wanted so much you’ll take anything he offers, and he offers you it all, reaches for you in the dark, kissing the nape of your neck, whispering poetic verse into your ear - you never took him for a scholar but he quotes Browning like the college boys who had you once, a long time ago - pressing up against you until sin becomes less temptation and more inevitability.

 

\---

 

How much time has passed?

How long before you’re undressing each other under the halcyon glow of a naked bulb? (fuck modesty, fuck this, fuck the bunker, fuck it all to hell) 

He gets on his knees and bows his head at your altar, and you touch him gently, slowly, the first time you’ve been unsure in months. The inside of your thighs catch light when he kisses him, parts them - like Moses and the Red Sea, you want to say, want to laugh, but you can’t - and he calls you holy. 

Holy, holy, holy. 

You like the way it rings in your ears.

 Or maybe you just like to feel again.

Like the way your lips feel against his jagged scars – LUST, GLUTTONY, WRATH, GREED, SLOTH, ENVY, PRIDE. Like to feel the way it burns when he pushes into you, like the way he bites a hard impression of his teeth into your shoulder and you cry out into the silence. Like the way he always stays, still and constant behind you, on top of you, hand splayed against your heart, listening for the rhythmic beat of blood still valiantly pumping through your veins. Anything that says we are here and we are still alive. 

Fucking beats fighting, but you still do that too.

 

\----

 

 “What do you dream about?” he asks at last, when you wake in the night again, crying out into the darkness, and he pulls you into his chest and strokes your hair. 

For a while you say nothing, breathing shallow against his skin.

“The end of the world.”

 You feel him tense around you, as he murmurs something inaudible by way of reply. 

He kisses your forehead and traces the notches of your spine. 

“Little lamb of mine,” he sighs. “I told you. The seals are all broken. Don’t you see? There’s nothing left to fear anymore.” 

But you’re not afraid of the end. That’s what Joseph doesn’t understand. 

You’re afraid of the beginning.

You’re afraid of a clean slate, you’re afraid of the other side of the door.

 “We’ll build a new world…a better world…just like I told you,” he murmurs. 

You shift in his arms, so your ear is flat against his chest, and close your eyes. 

“Tell me again.” 

He does.

 

\---

 

“Do you miss them?” 

Curiosity gets the better of you at last. He stares from across the table, looking down at the chessboard and then back up at you. 

“Who?” 

Playing dumb doesn’t suit him. You fix him with a hard stare.

“You fucking know who, Joseph.” 

He frowns, unused to his name being taken in vain. 

Two days later he confesses, when you’re listening to Etta James, lying on the cold floor. Hand in hand. 

“I miss them.” 

But you already know, because he talks in his sleep (because he has to sleep sometime, and at first you stayed awake on purpose, just to be sure). He mutters and mumbles and utters Jacob, Faith, John… under his breath.

You tap a coda gently against Joseph’s wrist and it seems to slow his pulse. 

Mutually-assured destruction. 

Dash, dash, dot, dash, dash, dot, dot.

M. A. D.


End file.
